13 Article Verification Strategies for Establishing Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research Janice M. Morse University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Michael Barrett University of Cambridge Cambridge, England Maria Mayan International Institute for Qualitative Methodology Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Karin Olson University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Jude Spiers University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada �� 2002 Morse et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract The rejection of reliability and validity in qualitative inquiry in the 1980s has resulted in an interesting shift for "ensuring rigor" from the investigator���s actions during the course of the research, to the reader or consumer of qualitative inquiry. The emphasis on strategies that are implemented during the research process has been replaced by strategies for evaluating trustworthiness and utility that are implemented once a study is completed. In this article, we argue that reliability and validity remain appropriate concepts for attaining rigor in qualitative research. We argue that qualitative researchers should reclaim responsibility for reliability and validity by implementing verification strategies integral and self-correcting during the conduct of inquiry itself. This ensures the attainment of rigor using strategies inherent within each qualitative design, and moves the responsibility for incorporating and maintaining reliability and validity from external reviewers��� judgements to the investigators themselves. Finally, we make a plea for a return to terminology for ensuring rigor that is used by mainstream science. Keywords: reliability validity verification qualitative research

International Journal of Qualitative Methods 2002, 1(2) 14 Acknowledgements: We acknowledge the support of the Council for Health Sciences, University of Alberta, and Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research in preparation of this manuscript Without rigor, research is worthless, becomes fiction, and loses its utility. Hence, a great deal of attention is applied to reliability and validity in all research methods. Challenges to rigor in qualitative inquiry interestingly paralleled the blossoming of statistical packages and the development of computing systems in quantitative research. Simultaneously, lacking the certainty of hard numbers and p values, qualitative inquiry expressed a crisis of confidence from both inside and outside the field. Rather than explicating how rigor was attained in qualitative inquiry, a number of leading qualitative researchers argued that reliability and validity were terms pertaining to the quantitative paradigm and were not pertinent to qualitative inquiry (Altheide & Johnson, 1998 Leininger, 1994). Some suggested adopting new criteria for determining reliability and validity, and hence ensuring rigor, in qualitative inquiry (Lincoln & Guba, 1985 Leininger, 1994 Rubin & Rubin, 1995). In seminal work in the 1980s, Guba and Lincoln substituted reliability and validity with the parallel concept of "trustworthiness," containing four aspects: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. Within these were specific methodological strategies for demonstrating qualitative rigor, such as the audit trail, member checks when coding, categorizing, or confirming results with participants, peer debriefing, negative case analysis, structural corroboration, and referential material adequacy (Guba & Lincoln, 1981 Lincoln & Guba, 1985 Guba & Lincoln, 1982). Later, Guba and Lincoln developed authenticity criteria that were unique to the constructivist assumptions and that could be used to evaluate the quality of the research beyond the methodological dimensions (Guba & Lincoln, 1989). While Guba warned that their criteria were "primitive" (Guba, 1981, p. 90), and should be used as a set of guidelines rather than another orthodoxy (Guba & Lincoln, 1982), aspects of their criteria have, in fact, been fundamental to development of standards used to evaluate the quality of qualitative inquiry. Thus, over the past two decades, reliability and validity have been subtly replaced by criteria and standards for evaluation of the overall significance, relevance, impact, and utility of completed research. Strategies to ensure rigor inherent in the research process itself were backstaged to these new criteria to the extent that, while they continue to be used, they are less likely to be valued or recognized as indices of rigor. While researchers have continued to use the terminology of reliability and validity in qualitative inquiry in Great Britain and Europe, those who do so in North America are a minority voice. These few authors argue that the broad and abstract concepts of reliability and validity can be applied to all research because the goal of finding plausible and credible outcome explanations is central to all research (Hammersley, 1992 Kuzel & Engel, 2001 Yin, 1994). We are concerned, nonetheless, that the focus on evaluation strategies that lie outside core research procedures results in a deemphasis on strategies built into each phase of the research strategies that can act as a self-correcting mechanism to ensure the quality of the project. This is an important issue and must be seen as more than just a paradigm debate. We suggest that by focusing on strategies to establish trustworthiness (Guba and Lincoln���s 1981 term for rigor1) at the end of the study, rather than focusing on processes of verification during the study, the investigator runs the risk of missing serious threats to the reliability and validity until it is too late to correct them.